How a lot of Reddit memes became the very best armor in Runesca
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Old School Runescape, the proudly antiquated model of RS Gold that still looks and performs like the game I snapped innumerable hours into when I really should've been studying, is getting a raid. Its next raid, as it happens: The Theatre of Blood. A good raid needs good rewards, so when the Theatre of Blood was declared late last year, players were anxious to find out exactly what clearing the multi-man challenge could make them. Jagex reacted with Justicar armor, a new best-in-slot armor place (above). There was one small problem: players absolutely hated it.
Actually they hated it so much , for months, the Old School community dogpiled the horn on the 2007scape subreddit and memed it to hell and back. They memed on it so tough that Jagex is now totally altering the armor's design. And not only that, the artist behind the Justicar armor,"Mod West," is utilizing layouts submitted and voted on by players. Almost all of Old School Runescape's updates go through player polls, but this is the first time that the suit of armor was forged in a fire of memes. The irony is that while players hated the'closing' armor revealed earlier this year, they adored the prototypes shown while the raid was announced. Originally, the Justicar armor was bulkier and part of a trio of armor sets, West tells me, but as the Theatre of Blood moved from vague concept to actual material, the armor changed with it. Participants said there was sufficient DPS gear but not enough tank gear, so it was narrowed down to just one armor collection. And when they were just going to use a single set, Jagex guessed they might also create a new one based on the armor worn by the raid's huge bad.
"We thought changing it a bit made sense," West says,"but players weren't quite on board with all the original proposal we shared stream. And , well, Reddit went wild." The memes came hard and quick. Many demanded a return to the model designs. Others believed the new armor didn't look tanky enough and liberally provided a few alternatives, with some calling for a more extreme redesign.
It got so bad that some players started to seriously believe a meme that the updated armor was by a different artist, and that the artist that made the prototypes had left Jagex. But then something amazing happened. Even as memes blotted out the sun, slowly but surely serious suggestions started to shine through. It started with crude Photoshop tasks, but shortly proper illustrations and fan art started to crop up. Players rallied around the notion of a bulkier, blessed armor set motivated by the Runescape god Saradomin, so they moved back to West's prototype designs and made some adjustments. Inspired from the memes and inspired by OSRS Buy Gold elements of West's designs and other players' ideas, legend_arts created a hybrid armor layout so good it not merely silenced the memes, it captured the attention of West himself.